1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electrical connector configured to retain a signal transmission medium by elastic engagement force of a lock member by inserting a terminal part of the signal transmission medium to a predetermined position in an insulating housing.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, in various electrical devices, etc., various electrical connectors are widely used as means for electrically connecting various signal transmission media such as flexible printed circuits (FPC) and flexible flat cables (FFC). For example, in an electrical connector mounted and used on a printed wiring board like below-described Patent Literature 1, a signal transmission medium composed of, for example, FPC or FFC is inserted from a front-end-side opening of an insulating housing (insulator) into the interior thereof, and an actuator (connection operating means) is then turned by operating force of an operator so as to be pushed down toward a connection working position in the front side or the rear side of the connector. As a result, part of a lock member is put into an engaging part provided at a terminal part of the signal transmission medium to achieve an engaged state, and the terminal part of the signal transmission medium is configured to be retained in an approximately immobile state by the lock member.
In this manner, an electrical connector having an actuator is configured to operate engagement/detachment of a lock member by carrying out operation to turn the actuator between a disconnecting position and a connection working position, wherein work efficiency is sometimes a problem since the actuator has to be operated separately from the operation to insert the signal transmission medium (for example, FPC, FFC). Therefore, for example, like below-described Patent Literature 2 and 3, an electrical connector provided with a so-called one-action automatic locking mechanism configured so that part of a lock member is elastically displaced so as to be placed over a signal transmission medium inserted into an insulating housing and that the part of the lock member is then put into an engaging part of the signal transmission medium to carry out engagement has been conventionally developed. When an electrical connector provided with such a one-action automatic locking mechanism is used, a signal transmission medium is retained in an approximately immobile state only by inserting the signal transmission medium to a predetermined position in the electrical connector, and work efficiency is improved.
However, the one-action automatic locking mechanism employed in conventional electrical connectors has an advantage that locking is carried out only by inserting a signal transmission medium (for example, FPC, FFC) into the electrical connector as described above; however, the configuration of a lock cancellation operating part for cancelling an engaged state of a latch lock part tends to be complex, the cancelling operation takes labor, and a problem may be caused in usage durability.